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“... In​ 1975 Angela Carter published a withering review of a star-studded production of Die Walküre, staged in the Roman amphitheatre at Orange. The classical setting was not Norse-friendly; the acoustics were horrible; the evening temperatures plummeted; and the wind wreaked havoc on the singers’ voices (Carter thought it was ‘probably blowing directly from Israel ...”

“... the eighty writers whom Newman anthologises seventy are men; and of the ten women only three – Angela Carter and two of her contemporaries – describe a woman attempting to get her way with a man. In the literature of seduction men have been allocated the words with which to propose – And now she lets him whisper in her ...”

“... to compose a hysterical opera composed in about equal parts black comedy and magic realism, as if Angela Carter, perhaps, had rewritten The Good Soldier Svejk, a work Meek mentions in his notes; and in the book the Jewish lieutenant, Mutz, has a similar thought. It did not seem possible that a woman whose husband had castrated himself for God’s sake ...”

“... only with Moore, but with Lucia Berlin, Joy Williams and Grace Paley. The problem with charm, as Angela Carter wrote in a piece about Paley in these pages, is that it can be cloying (LRB, 17 April 1980). ‘You’re helping someone out for once,’ a mother says to her grown son. A little girl calls her aunt on the phone – ‘My mom needs you right ...”

“... bittersweet mysticism, other names suggest themselves here too: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Fay Weldon.) She slowly assumed the status of national treasure, despite or maybe precisely because of the cannily maintained, resonantly low profile. There are forms of politesse and prevarication that can slot very well into a wider tactical ...”

“... higher. After the renewal of the English novel in the 1980s – Amis, Barnes, Ishiguro, Mo, Carter, Rushdie, McEwan – we move into the free-for-all 1990s, in which realism is for sale alongside genre fiction, postmodern fun alongside ladlit. What this history lacks, ironically enough, is a sense of literary history. At one point Stevenson writes that ...”

“... and they exist that way, and that is the only way to see things truly, in my opinion.’ Angela Carter, writing about Stead’s work in the LRB, saw her many novels as one long debate.* ‘Stead’s work always has this movement, always contains a movement forward and then a withdrawal to a different position.’ Yet it’s possible she ...”

“... repetitions and sequencing. This approach comes close to that of a quick-eared anthologist, like Angela Carter in her Book of Fairy Tales, where she manages to give fresh meanings to stale misogynist topoi simply by framing and grouping the tales under subheadings such as ‘Good Girls and Where It Gets Them’ and ‘Strong Minds and Low ...”

“... worry about sex-magic, and we start to quake. ‘What is the opposite of a dog?’ asked Angela Carter when she reviewed Sinclair’s second novel, Downriver, three years ago for the LRB. ‘This question begins and ends the book, this manic travelogue of a city about to burn, and I can’t even begin to answer.’ Well, James Joyce knew the ...”

“... to larger-than-life mythic figures, giants and ogres, Frankenstein and Rapunzstiltskin. And, like Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber, she seeks to revise ‘male’ fairy-tales and legends, and to celebrate the subversiveness of their ‘grim’ (or ‘Grimm’) sisters: the bawd who boasts ‘there is mayhem in my smile’; the lady rescued from a ...”

“... any competent romantic novelist would use.’ This is one of the two novels which, 35 years later, Angela Carter would rate as more important than The Golden Notebook. Stead and Blake both began to fail commercially. For the first time both wrote books no publisher would take. By 1952 they were married at last and both (he 57, she 49) looking for ...”

“... to the way its characters pay attention to people outside their own social groups. I remember Angela Carter saying that she warmed to any novel (I think she mentioned Maureen Duffy’s Capital) whose characters used public transport – it made a nice change. Late in life, Alec makes vivid mental notes on his fellow passengers while travelling on the ...”

“... dead hand of intention’. This code can have its comic side, as when Bayley writes about Angela Carter. He seems to be praising her work, but the seasoned Bayley-watcher will know that he is really semaphoring his deep disapproval. In his essay on Austen, Bayley commends her lightness: ‘The light is the best foil for the dark: boredom, misery ...”

“... and frocks and shrouds. And the modern writer who best understood and enlarged such traditions – Angela Carter – was also a brilliant fashion critic, for New Society, early in her career. ‘There is something eerie about a museum of costume,’ Elizabeth Wilson wrote in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (1985), a study much influenced by Mary ...”